A Volatile Mixture Exploded Into Rampage in Central Park

At 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, four tourists from Texas left the galleries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and began to make their way through the crowds gathering for the National Puerto Rican Day Parade along Fifth Avenue.

They were petite, middle-aged women, and they said they were made uncomfortable by the odor of marijuana and alcohol. Clutching their purses, avoiding eye contact, searching for a quick escape, they said, they headed for an opening between two groups of young men, perhaps 20 in all.

''First they started patting our bottoms,'' said Sharon Brown, 52, a retired school teacher. ''Then they started spitting in their hands and then rubbing it in our hair. And then the hitting got harder.''

Police officers lined Fifth Avenue, but Mrs. Brown said that not one tried to stop the humiliation. Maybe, Mrs. Brown offered, they did not see what had happened. But she added, ''They really didn't appear to be watching.''

A few hours later, Richard Walsh, a 43-year-old businessman, was running laps around the reservoir in Central Park when he noticed several young men spraying water on women and yelling lewd insults at them.

On three consecutive laps, Mr. Walsh said, he alerted a nearby contingent of some 40 police officers taking cover in the shade to what was happening. The officers, he said, never budged in the 90-degree heat, and the young men continued to menace women.

Long before the worst of the violence broke out at the fringes of this year's Puerto Rican Day Parade, the central elements of trouble were already starting to gell in dangerous and unpredictable ways.

Just as a thundercloud is fueled by moisture and heat, Sunday's attacks on women in Central Park were fueled by an alchemy of alcohol, marijuana, oppressive weather, testosterone and lapses in police strategy, tactics and communication.

The result -- embarrassingly displayed to a worldwide audience, thanks to grainy amateur videos -- was a day of terror for 47 women and a black eye for a police force more often criticized for being overly aggressive.

For days now, city officials have struggled to explain the sight of weeping, beer-soaked women stumbling out of the park after they were robbed, groped or stripped bare in one of the most heavily policed areas of the city.

As more victims and eyewitness accounts have surfaced, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and other top police officials have rapidly retreated from early statements that seemed to minimize the violence and exonerate the Police Department's handling of the parade.

Even as detectives continue to round up suspects -- 8 more were arrested yesterday, bringing the total to 16 -- another police investigation is focusing on how the 4,000 police officers assigned to the parade were deployed, when officers were sent home and how senior commanders communicated with one another about the movements of more than a million people.

''We're going to critique this very closely to make sure that it doesn't happen in the future,'' Police Commissioner Howard Safir said this week.

Any examination of the department's performance during and after the parade will have to try to reconcile a certain indisputable level of enforcement -- the department wrote hundreds of citations for public drinking, which is illegal -- with a widespread sense among people at and around the parade that gross misconduct went virtually ignored.

All week, for instance, city officials have battled direct or implicit accusations that the police deliberately took a hands-off approach because of the department's tense relations with minority groups.

Mr. Giuliani has strongly disputed this notion, and police officials have provided statistics showing, if anything, a history of somewhat tougher enforcement.

During this year's St. Patrick's Day Parade, for example, the police confiscated 200 open alcohol containers, compared with 2,601 confiscations during this year's Puerto Rican parade.

''Maybe we're in a period of time in which the police can't win,'' Mr. Giuliani said yesterday on his weekly radio program.

Police officials said there was no letup this year, and according to police figures, officers issued hundreds more summonses for petty crimes and noise complaints than they did at last year's parade.

There have been ''a lot of complaints fairly recently that the police have become too strict in quality of life enforcement,'' one police official said. ''That in my mind is one of the main things that keeps the control of various types of events, such as parades, such as New Year's Eve in Times Square. The enforcement is necessary. That helps to set the tone.''

But according to a growing number of witnesses, police officers failed again and again on Sunday to provide even the mildest of responses to scenes of obvious disorder and lawlessness.

What's more, several witnesses have alleged in interviews this week, some officers failed to react to specific complaints about women being mistreated and harassed.

''Is it normal to just turn the city over to those kinds of people?'' asked Mrs. Brown, of Texas, expressing one common view.

The Police Department reported that it made one marijuana arrest during the parade and confiscated 16 bags of marijuana. But many witnesses described dozens, if not hundreds, of people openly smoking marijuana, many of them in plain view of police officers.

''I was concerned about secondhand smoke, that's how bad it was,'' said Shelly English, 37, who was jogging in Central Park on Sunday.

Deputy Chief Thomas P. Fahey, a department spokesman, denied those claims, arguing that it did not make sense for officers to ignore blatant drug use. ''If I have a parade detail and I walk my route and smell marijuana, I'd go ballistic,'' he said. ''Why? Because I know my boss is going to come along soon, and if he smells something, he's going to ask me what the hell I'm doing.''

Special police teams, each with 24 officers, roved along the parade route, confiscating open alcohol containers and writing summonses, but many thousands more teenagers and young people clearly drank alcohol with impunity, many people at the parade said.

Some men circulated in the crowds openly hawking miniature bottles of rum and vodka. ''There was alcohol all over the street, bottles of liquor, people offering shots,'' said Nathan Poe, 27, a Web site developer from Brooklyn.

Chief Fahey said that officers sometimes decide, quite properly, that it is a better use of their time to direct traffic than to go after someone with an open can of beer.

But police officials have acknowledged in interviews that the department's tactical and strategic decisions may have contributed to a set of circumstances that permitted some of the worst incidents of violence to go forward unchecked.

Take, for example, the most serious string of assaults, those that happened inside the park on Center Drive, just north of the intersection of Central Park South and the Avenue of the Americas. Roughly half the assaults occurred there during a frenzy of attacks about 6 p.m., police records show.

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Police officials have said that 950 officers were deployed inside Central Park during the parade, 120 more than last year. But none, they now say, were assigned to cover the stretch of Center Drive where the assaults took place. The 10 or so amateur videos that have surfaced thus far seem to support that point: no uniformed officers can be seen in the crowd on Center Drive, senior police officials said.

In hindsight, this could be seen as a crucial oversight on the part of police commanders. But police officials said that they deployed officers based on their analysis of past trouble spots, and that analysis, they said, is why the vast majority of the 950 officers were stationed along the eastern edge of the park, by the parade route itself.

A number of parade veterans, though, have said Central Park South has for years been the scene of a kind of rowdy overspill.

For several years now, the Avenue of the Americas has been a popular gathering spot for young people both during and after the parade -- a kind of parade off the main parade. Young motorcyclists spin their tires so that great clouds of burning rubber fill the street, primping teenagers hang out of car windows, waving flags, and gang members flash hand signals.

Moreover, at least six people -- including hot-dog vendors, doormen, store employees and victims -- recalled seeing 5 to 10 police officers positioned in and around the intersection of Central Park South and the Avenue of the Americas. And from that intersection the officers might have had a clear view of the mob some 30 to 70 yards away on Center Drive.

Here again, though, a vagary in the Police Department's deployment worked against the victims, because Central Park South marks the dividing line between the Manhattan North zone, which includes Central Park, and the Manhattan South zone, which covers everything below the park -- including Central Park South itself.

And according to police officials, as the parade wound down, senior commanders in Manhattan South, where things appeared to be calm, began sending their officers home after a long, hot day on the street.

It appears that most of the extra officers with the best potential view of what was happening just inside the park may have been pulled out at roughly the time that the mob violence was starting to rapidly escalate.

''There was not a riot going on,'' Chief Fahey said. ''We did what we always do. The parade was over, we waited an hour, and we let some of the officers go home. We didn't know about what was going on in the park off Sixth Avenue. And as soon as we did, we put a stop to it.''

What that means is that at the moment when things began to spiral out of control, the area of greatest menace was virtually empty of police protection.

It didn't take long, then, for the mix of police bad luck and emboldened, brutish young men to yield disaster.

It was about 5:15 p.m., still above 90 degrees, when a burly young man stole a bag of ice from an ice van that had stopped on the Avenue of Americas just south of the park.

Witnesses said the man, a distinctive figure with a lion's face tattooed across his bare back and the words ''Puerto Rico'' shaved into the back of his head, began pressing the ice bag against the backs of young women. Someone punctured the ice bag, and young men began dropping ice cubes down women's shirts.

Several women laughed and smiled and sassed the young men. But at least one woman grew angry when men surrounded her and trapped her against a storefront, dousing her with water, witnesses said.

There were several police officers in the area, and one, a supervisor in a white shirt, was seen by passers-by leading off a young man who had been involved in the ice cube horseplay.

Things quieted for a bit, but then, according to several people whose combined accounts provided a graphic portrait of the violence, the group re-formed just inside the park, on Center Drive.

Now self-appointed ''scouts'' began to signal to the larger group when they spotted women who fit their calculus of sexual appeal, witnesses said. ''Yo, yo, here comes a good one!'' they would call out, as unsuspecting women approached. Several older women got through. For the young and attractive, nearby fences helped form a natural chute into which they were steered.

Many said they had no idea what they were entering until it was too late. Men would close around them from all sides, spraying water on their heads, their backs, everywhere. The men, when their water bottles and squirt guns ran dry, simply filled them back up from a water trough used by the horses that pull carriages through the park.

Some women said they tried to stay near their friends, but they were quickly separated by the crowd. So they screamed their friends' names, to no avail. Some women tried to run, only to be chased down and surrounded once more.

There was yelling of ''Get 'em, get 'em,'' and chants of ''Go, go, go,'' and misogynistic curses, and more young men joined the mob -- men who wore crucifixes. And some of these men began to tear at shirts, to pull on bras, to tug on shorts.

The women, of course, fought to stay clothed. They clutched torn shirts to their chests, and they tried to swat sweaty hands away from their straps and zippers. But they were hopelessly outnumbered, and several of them suddenly found themselves half-naked in a bleary, swirling crowd of strange men. Even then, the women tried to hold their arms across their chests, and yet men pulled at their arms, too. Ashanna Cover, 21, of New Jersey, recalled that a man squeezed her breast so hard that it hurt.

One young woman, hair matted with beer and water, her top torn off, huddled against a wall, and still men tried to grope at her. Some women said they were groped and grabbed and prodded so violently that their genitals were scratched and bruised.

Some women began to fear that they were going to be gang raped right there in the shadow of Trump Parc, right there inside the crown jewel of New York City. Some feared they were about to be trampled. Pam Abrams, a 42-year-old Web site designer who was near the worst of the violence, said she remembered screams of, ''Yeah! Yeah! Get her!''

Peyton Bryant, who was pulled to the ground off her in-line skates, curled up in a fetal position. She said the men, hooting and giggling, would yank her shorts down to her thighs, and she would yank them back up. Over and over this happened, even as she kicked and thrashed with her skates.

More men were drawn to the mob. Some took pictures. Some took videos. The police said some robbed the women of cell phones, purses, jewelry. Some surged closer to get a peek at what they could. Every now and then, a man would tell another man to cool it, to back off, but only every now and then, and not a single one among them dialed 911 to summon help.

In fact, some men had strangely bored looks on their faces, as if what they were watching was a tired Jerry Springer rerun. It was as if the crowd had turned a patch of Central Park into an outdoor version of a topless bar, only it was worse; the women were not willing participants, and there were no bouncers to protect them. .

One woman, stripped naked, managed to make it to the safety of a small three-wheeled police scooter, and still men converged on the scooter to get a look. Watching from just across the street was Rita Berlin, 26, manager of the Whiskey Park, an upscale bar at 100 Central Park South.

Ms. Berlin said she had endured unrelenting harassment as she pushed through unruly and drunken street crowds late Sunday afternoon to get to work. Now, as she watched the poor naked woman, as she wondered why there were not more police officers about, she felt a deep sense of shame and anger.

''This,'' she said later, ''was the worst day I have ever seen in New York in my entire life -- the trash, the people, the complete disregard for anything.''